Un-Natural History
James Prosek (b. 1975) is a man who straddles realms and bridges centuries. Clearly entranced by Mother Earth in all Her terrestrial majesty, the artist – like the creatures (both real and imagined) that he conjures in watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, graphite and mica on painstakingly prepared tea-stained grounds – possesses an ethereal quality that speaks to another, more fluid domain. Prosek’s protean aura is fuelled by his apparent capacity to “channel” several vastly different eras, often simultaneously. It is quite easy, for example, to envision him ensconced in a seventeenth-century Cabinet of Curiosities, lost in the careful study of a prized collection of wondrous exotica. It is equally plausible to imagine the artist surveying the verdant fells of England’s Lake District with the Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) or probing the depths of the animated soul with William Butler Yeats (1865-1939; one of Prosek’s personal heroes and a figure whom he studied closely while an undergraduate at Yale University).
Reality, however, lodges him firmly in his Easton, Connecticut studio, with its picturesque views of a nearby pond and surrounding fields. There Prosek, when not traveling to the far reaches of the globe in search of specimens, interprets and reinvents nature; often to scale, meaning that works such as his monumental Atlantic Sailfish (plate 9) can only be painted on vast expanses of paper laid flat on the floor. Further dissipating the clouds of nostalgic reverie that the artist’s persona precipitates is his critical approach to art-making. Through his subtle, yet pointed, questioning of traditional taxonomies, or systems of order, Prosek reveals the arbitrariness – and the intense power – of collecting, naming, and classifying objects and creatures from the natural world. It is this type of rigorous intellectual examination that makes him uniquely of our age. It is equally what makes Un-Natural History, an exhibition of the artist’s most recent work mounted by Fairfield University’s Bellarmine Museum of Art (October 21-December 21, 2011), so lively and exhilarating.
Jill J. Deupi is the Director of the Bellarmine Museum of Art and an Assistant Professor of Art History at Fairfield University
October 21 - December 21, 2011
Bellarmine Museum of Art,
Fairfield University
Fairfield, CT
Antiques and the Arts Weekly Review
